A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

I draw a modest income with my media production business, but being self-employed makes health insurance damn near impossible to afford. Hell, with the way self-employment taxes are set up, we're lucky to be able to pay those.

Because of this catch-22 (running your own business at the expense of normal company perks like medical care), I find myself thinking things that no one in an emergency should have to deal with. You see, at a Mother's Day barbecue last month, my son accidentally lit himself on fire. The barbecue was luau themed and he was wearing a grass skirt. Getting too close to an open flame with all of that dead grass and he was quickly running in circles in the backyard trying to put himself out before family members came to his aid.

My first thought (other than, "Jesus, he's on fire!") was, "Is this bad enough to need an emergency room visit?"

Hip-hop, martial arts, chess. An odd trio? Not at all, according to RZA, a founder of the rap group Wu-Tang Clan.

“Hip-hop is a battle game,” he said. “Chess is a battle. Martial arts is a battle.”

The three disciplines came together on Oct. 13 in the Galleria at the San Francisco Design Center, where the Hip-Hop Chess Federation held the Kings Invitational tournament. The federation, founded by the writer and lecturer Adisa Banjoko and Leo Libiran, a visual artist, seeks to use “music, chess and martial arts to promote unity, strategy and nonviolence,” according to its Web site.

For our tenth anniversary issue of tpm we put ten 10 questions to ten leading thinkers. Here is how they answered just one of them: Has philosophy responded adequately to the big events and debates of the last decade, such as climate change and the post-9/11 world?

Mr. Sedaris’s wickedly deadpan prose might suggest a man who is wry but secretly misanthropic, maybe a little weird and prickly, one of those funny-but-difficult characters who do better in writing than in real life. But at 51 he is as gentle and unassuming as his appearance would suggest. He is slight and on the short side, with a mild-mannered face and surprised eyes framed by short, graying hair. His are the unthreatening kind of looks, he said in his quiet, nasal voice, that cause people to come up to him on the street and talk to him.